Visually communicating “this ain’t gonna be easy!”

Over time, various methods of conveying terrain have been developed to guide those tackling it. The Ordnance Survey, for example, communicates the shape and steepness of the land by using contour lines, that get closer as the gradient increases.

Obviously, this kind of data is going to be integral to the Hills Are Evil! project. How we go about displaying this information to the user is less obvious, although the idea of ski slope maps has been a recurring one during discussions.

Ski resorts grade the steepness of various routes on the piste and communicate this through colour. This is an appealing method of communication due to it being simple and free from language restrictions.

Unfortunately there is not a uniform system for this: while the easy-to-difficult progression in Europe is generally blue to red to black, in France they mark the easiest routes as green. In North America however they go from green to blue to black, also incorporating a variety of shaped symbols to add to the confusion. This lack of a universally accepted rule to displaying ski slopes does suggest a problem in making the service universally accessible, and shows that colour is a fairly arbitrary method of distinction. Also, slopes are measured almost solely on their gradient, as snow cover can vary a lot, and so incorporating topographical data is a bit like a whole other slalom of challenges.

Despite these drawbacks in the ski slope method, the idea is one with mileage, at least for incorporating into our system-to-beat-all-systems (hopefully). One question that comes to mind for me is whether routes would be graded section by section, which could be confusing, or for overall difficulty which runs the risk of small impassable points being missed in the averaging process.

OS contour lines deal with a single aspect of terrain: gradient. Ski slope maps are generally gradient based but also take into account the twists and turns of the route, with a view to enabling skiers to make personal, ability-based judgements on which run to do down. This is why it translates to the Hills Are Evil project so well. The challenge facing us is how to improve it to incorporate drop-kerbs, cobbles etc.